Scoop on IMAZ Volunteering

Great weekend, ok I'm feeling it now, so much energy.  Craig and I left Friday afternoon, we met up with my tri buddies on Saturday morning before the volunteer meeting! So fun, I will post a picture when I get it from Craig's phone.  So the scoop on volunteering at IMAZ--We did morning/dry clothes bags, we got there at 5:00am and stood around not doing very much until close to the start time, and then the onslaught of bags!!!  At first you can somewhat organize them, but at some point they start coming at you so fast all you can do is build a mountain!  Inevitably people forgot things and left them in their bags, gu, swim caps, goggles--and believe it or not I think we found everyone when they came back (remember the mountain) no easy feat.  It is a huge job to organize all the bags numerically in rows, some bags must weigh 50 pounds!  It was also a little sad to have some of the swimmers who didn't finish the swim come back for their dry clothes.  I talked to one lady who was doing her 21st Ironman she said she didn't know what happened, she wasn't sick, but just started coughing so much that she couldn't continue.  After organizing the bags all of the bikes of the DNF's were pulled off the racks and checked, then we reracked the bikes and at 10:00 am or so we were finished.  We hung out for awhile and cheered, especially for the last people coming in off the bike course, we should have stayed for the final finish, I kinda wanted to but I didn't sleep well the night before and knew we would be up early today.  Jason, next to me in line this morning said it was the best finish, there was a lady all bent over (oh my visions of last year, been there!) who was so close but just wasn't going to make it, Mike Reilly went out to help her come in, she was leaning on him and still not making it fast enough, he literally pushed her over the finish line with not a second to spare.  I'm hoping someone will post that one on Youtube.  Craig had patients scheduled starting at 2:00 today so we were anxious to get home.  Everyone said it was best to get in line for on site registration about 6:00am, since we wanted to get out of there early we decided to go down at 5:00am----good call.  It was still a long wait but we were on the road by about 7:45 or so.  I was about 20th in the volunteer line which snaked clear back down to the road.  So here it is 365 days, I'm pretty jazzed, I just wish I could keep this feeling going for the whole year!
Oh yeah, and what to volunteer for the next time I volunteer, I would do Saturday registration for the current years athlete to do the following year (did that make sense?). Some nice perks with that one!